Telecommunication networks provide for the transmission of information across some distance through terrestrial, wireless or satellite communication networks. Such communications may involve voice, data or multimedia information, among others. In addition, telecommunication networks often offer features and/or services to the customers of the network that provide flexible and varied ways in which the communications are transmitted over the network. For example, some telecommunication networks provide toll-free communications in which a called customer may pay for all long-distance telephone calls made to the customer or customer's network. In general, toll-free communications allow a customer to the network to receive calls from disparate locations around the country without passing the cost of such long-distance calls to callers to the customer.
In addition, many telecommunication companies, through acquisitions and mergers with other telecommunication entities, may maintain distinct networks for providing such toll-free services to customers of the company. However, managing distinct networks provide several challenges to the telecommunication company. For example, provisioning procedures for each network may be different requiring network managers for the telecommunication company to learn the different provisioning procedures. In addition, each network may provide different features for the company's customers, but all such features may not be available in every region of the network footprint. Thus, to provide such services to the customers, the network managers may route communications from one distinct network to the other, which may in turn consume valuable network resources. Thus, it is often advantageous to combine, as much as possible, distinct networks into a single managed network when additional networks or network resources are obtained through such acquisitions.
It is with these and other issues that various aspects of the present disclosure were developed.